Tricky – Love Cats (Live)

Last week I posted a track from the Tindersticks show that is the odds favorite to be my best show of the year. On the other hand, I hopefully won’t find a show this year that is more disappointing than this recent one by Tricky. The show started auspiciously with this track where Tricky’s cracker-jack band and female back-up (ostensibly) vocalist lead this groovy take on this The Cure song, which features Tricky murmuring to decent effect in the background. What I didn’t realize at that point, however, is that the vocals in this track ended up being 1/4 of the vocal duties that Tricky would utter for the total rest of the set. I would go so far to say that if Tricky was paid $10 for each unique word sung that night he would have walked out of there with under $200. So, get this, for the remainder of the set while the rest of the band played “Karmacoma” and the like, with vocals taken on by an increasingly overworked ‘back-up’ singer, Tricky would thrash his head back and forth trance-like only to stop and pull off mary-ju-wana cigarette. This went on for an hour. I was pretty livid at that point that Tricky could phone it in for a whole set.

But wait. Tricky was not done. After a full set of not performing, Tricky has the gall to show up for an encore where he did ramble on an initial track, which was probably just to prevent the audience from storming the stage and stealing equipment to compensate for the wasted $40 paid for the ticket. He than proceeded to ‘perform’ for another 45 minutes which ended up being more of the same of him loving his bad self. Towards the end of this, and to add insult to injury, the band breaks into “Ace of Spades”, which if Tricky laid into it, would have killed, but no, the back-up vocalist, would fill the vocal duties while Tricky walked around the audience hugging people and posing for pictures from people’s cellphones.

In sum, I suspect Tricky didn’t even perform a single song worth of vocals over the course of the whole near two hour show. Like I said, the band and deputized lead vocalist were damn good, but even so, I couldn’t enjoy the show with the band’s namesake dicking around onstage (and off) for 2 solid fucking hours. Even if he bothered to sing just a handful of songs, much would have been forgiven.

Conclusion: Tricky can eat a dick.

Like I said, here is probably the best performance of the night which highlights the wasted potential of what could have been a pretty wicked good show.

Download: Tricky – Love Cats (Live)